How ISIS Got a Foothold in the Philippines

By Sidney Jones

June 4, 2017

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A Filipino soldier in Marawi City on Mindanao Island in the Philippines last month.CreditCreditFrancis R. Malasig/European Pressphoto Agency

For about two weeks now, dozens of Islamist militants have faced off against the Philippine armed forces in the city of Marawi, on the southern island of Mindanao, where most of the Philippines’ Muslim minority lives. The pitched battle, which is unusually fierce even by the standards of this conflict-prone part of the country, indicates that the Islamic State is now also a Southeast Asian problem and that the Philippine government may be the region’s weak link in addressing it.

While President Rodrigo Duterte focused his energies during his first year in office on waging a brutal campaign against suspected drug dealers and users, a motley coalition supporting the Islamic State — former guerrillas, university students, scions of political families, Christian converts to Islam — grew into a fighting force with surprising staying power. Mindanao has long been home to insurgencies, but the advent of this coalition, which is more ideological and has closer links to Islamists abroad than any local group before it, marks the government’s failure to understand how the nature of extremism in the Philippines has changed.

Pro-autonomy armed rebellions have been active in Mindanao since the 1970s. The Moro National Liberation Front (M.N.L.F.) reached a peace agreement with the government in 1996, but factions that disliked some of the deal’s terms continued to fight. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front (M.I.L.F.), a splinter group with some 12,000 fighters, began negotiations the same year and nearly reached a final settlement under Mr. Duterte’s predecessor. But the peace process collapsed in early 2015 and despite a few initiatives by the new government, it remains stalemated.

Foreign terrorists have periodically appeared on the margins of the insurgencies, notably from Al Qaeda in the mid-1990s and later Jemaah Islamiyah, an Indonesia-based extremist organization. In 2005, when the M.I.L.F. expelled a small group of these men to pursue talks with the government, they joined Abu Sayyaf, another splinter group that opposed the M.N.L.F’s deal with the government. Based in the Sulu Archipelago, southwest of Mindanao, Abu Sayyaf wanted an Islamic state for Muslim Mindanao. The group became known for various kidnap-for-ransom activities, but through the mid-2000s it also welcomed foreign terrorists seeking refuge.

It was thus unsurprising that Isnilon Hapilon, a leader of Abu Sayyaf, would be among the first militants in the Philippines to pledge loyalty to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State leader, after he declared a caliphate in Mosul, Iraq, in 2014. By early 2016, a new pro-Islamic State coalition was emerging under Mr. Hapilon, uniting groups across regional and ethnic lines.

The government was dismissive of the growing threat. Soon after Mr. Duterte became president last year, he set out to destroy Abu Sayyaf in response to a series of beheadings of kidnapping victims. In fact, the kidnappers had no links to the Hapilon faction. Partly because of the government’s failure to appreciate this fact, it also failed to see that by then the Islamic State-friendly coalition already extended beyond Abu Sayyaf and that its leaders were driven by ideology rather than profit. A military offensive against Mr. Hapilon’s forces on Basilan, a small island south of Mindanao, in mid-2016 only succeeded in getting the group to move its operational headquarters to the jungles of Lanao del Sur, a province in central Mindanao. Marawi is the province’s capital.

The bombing of a night market in September 2016 in Davao, the city Mr. Duterte led as mayor before he became president, should have been a wake-up call for the government. Several suspected perpetrators later told the police that while they had acted on Mr. Hapilon’s instructions, the operation had been planned and organized by the Maute brothers, the leaders of the group based in Lanao del Sur. The Mautes were a new breed of extremists: young, charismatic, Arabic-speaking, educated in the Middle East, social-media savvy and with vast international connections. Their extended family was part of Marawi’s political and business elite, as well as related by marriage to M.I.L.F.’s highest echelons. Since last November the Maute group has clashed with the army repeatedly, twice taking over the small town of Butig.

Military operations have been no deterrent: The fighters occupying Marawi today come not just from the Lanao del Sur faction but also from the wider pro-Islamic State coalition, including from Basilan and abroad. Some of the men killed in Marawi recently were nationals of Indonesia, Malaysia and Saudi Arabia.

In April 2014 — even before the caliphate was declared in Mosul — three Malaysians joined Mr. Hapilon in Basilan. The most senior of them, known as Abu Anas the Emigré, appears to have been in direct contact with the Islamic State’s central command. After Abu Anas was killed on Basilan in December 2015, Mahmud Ahmad, once a professor of Islamic studies at the University of Malaya, took over as chief strategist, financier and recruiter, first for Mr. Hapilon and later for the whole coalition. He is currently believed to be in Marawi.

In mid-2016, with travel across the Turkish border with Syria becoming increasingly difficult, Islamic State leaders endorsed the jihad in Mindanao. Last June, the group’s official media released a video showing an Indonesian, a Malaysian and a Filipino urging compatriots who could not reach Syria to go to the Philippines instead.

A steady stream of similar exhortations has appeared on pro-Islamic State channels of the social media application Telegram. The recent takeover of Marawi, greeted with euphoria by extremists on social media sites in Indonesia and elsewhere, almost certainly will lead to more foreigners wanting to fight in the Philippines.

This is why Mr. Duterte must come up with a strategy to confront the Islamic State coalition that goes beyond airstrikes and the ever-greater use of force.

Martial law, which the president declared in Mindanao on May 23, may lead to more arrests and detentions, but it will not get at the roots of radicalization: poor governance, a dysfunctional legal system and endemic poverty. Prisons, dilapidated and overcrowded, are a prime recruiting ground for terrorists.

The government urgently needs to get the peace process in Mindanao back on track. The longer it stalls, the greater the danger that disillusioned members of M.I.L.F. will join the extremist coalition.

The Duterte administration’s response to Islamist extremism so far has been to try to crush it militarily. But too often strong-arm tactics only breed more fighters — and fighters with a desire for revenge. The Philippine government must instead come up with a comprehensive strategy to fix the social, economic and political problems that have led Islamic State ideologues to exert so much appeal in Mindanao.

Sidney Jones is director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict in Jakarta, Indonesia.